Key Takeaways:
[00:07:35] Know your target demographic in detail. Altea Active specifically targets university-educated customers, who are statistically more likely to prioritize health and consider fitness “an unconditional spend,” Nolan says.
[00:18:03] Building a team is serious business. Altea Active’s hiring process is rigorous—sometimes involving as many as four interviews, depending on the position—and so is onboarding.
[00:20:52] As the company grows, be open to adapting your service offerings, but don’t give up your core values. Altea Active customizes its services and facilities to local customer preferences, but its core offering remains the same: “the service and execution of a premium fitness product.”
[00:29:30] Look after yourself. Nolan emphasizes that you can’t build a team of high performers if you’re a physical and emotional wreck. Take time to stay in shape, enjoy life and give your employees a model upon which to base their own journeys.
Get the people strategy right
Mike Nolan has never been afraid to pour blood, sweat and tears into something he’s passionate about. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was a world-class competitor in the decathlon, a 10-event sport that is perhaps the most demanding of all athletics, and he represented Team Canada at several national and international competitions, including the IAAF World Championships and two Commonwealth Games. Getting there took training, commitment and, more than anything, hard work.
“That’s what made me a great decathlete,” he says now. “I worked harder than everyone else. And that’s what makes me strong in business, because I work harder than most.”
Yet Nolan also recognizes that while achieving excellence, whether in elite sports or entrepreneurship, might seem like an individual journey, the reality is that no one does it alone. As an athlete, he relied on his coaches to help him become his best. And as co-founder and COO of premium fitness club chain Altea Active, success depends in large part on customers and staff. In short, it depends on having an effective people strategy.
Know your customer
It was insight into customer needs that led to the creation of Altea Active. After his athletic career, Nolan worked as a personal trainer, and he saw that the real benefit of fitness for his clients wasn’t just getting in better shape. “It obviously transformed their bodies,” he says, but the goal is to transform “their greater life”—their physical and mental wellbeing, their longevity, their relationships with family and friends, their food and sleep habits.
After spending more than 15 years as an executive in the health club industry, Nolan cofounded Altea Active in 2018 to offer a premium fitness experience to consumers. But not just any consumers. From the beginning, when the Altea team was developing strategy for the launch of their first club, they had a clear plan to target a highly educated clientele. “There’s a correlation between people that have university educations and their understanding of health and the priority [they put] on that in their lifestyle,” Nolan says, “meaning [that for them], it’s an unconditional spend.”
Reaching that demographic means taking into a consideration several factors, such as location. In Winnipeg, Altea Active’s spacious facility is in the suburbs. In Toronto, however, the company opened its first Ontario location in Liberty Village—a densely populated, urban neighbourhood that skews young and educated. For Altea, starting up there meant figuring out how to deliver the same service levels and fitness experience in a much smaller space. “We shrunk down areas that were too big, and we expanded areas that needed to grow,” Nolan says.
After Toronto, Altea went on to start other clubs in Vancouver and Ottawa (it has plans to open more) while adapting its offerings to the local customer base. “There’s a little bit of a different expectation in each of the unique demographics that we live in,” says Nolan. But he emphasizes that the primary value proposition of Altea Active stays the same from location to location. “There’s a core root of what it is we’re doing, and that’s the service and execution of a premium fitness product,” he explains. “If that’s our true north, … then the rest of the elements are more about who and where and what it is we’re providing to [clients].”
Building the team
The “who” in that equation matters a lot. Altea Active focuses on hiring the right people to deliver on its brand promise and premium services. Skills are important, of course, but so is finding team members with whom customers can relate and feel comfortable. “The people we have as employees delivering that fitness experience in those respective demographics—they’re just like the people they’re servicing,” Nolan explains.
“It’s almost like we’re reflecting back to the members and potential clients with our staff—who they are and what they want to become.”
When hiring, Nolan emphasizes so-called “soft” skills and the ability to represent Altea Active’s brand promise. In the front-of-house, he says, employees “have to be charismatic. They have to be vibrant. They have to be energetic [and] passionate about fitness.” But that doesn’t just apply to customer-facing staff: even in maintenance and operations positions, he wants employees to have “not just the traits the position requires, but [also] the buy-in to the brand, the passion for the fitness element.”
That might seem like a tall order for a service-oriented business in what has been a tight labour market, but Altea Active does not compromise when hiring. Nolan says job candidates have to attend three or four rounds of interviews for key positions, and two or three for secondary ones. “It’s never just one interview and you’re hired,” he explains. The same rigorous approach applies to onboarding, which Nolan describes as “very intensive.” While keeping the process enjoyable and engaging, “you want to expose [new hires] not just to the sunny days—you’ve got to give them the storm,” he says. “You have to push them and make them realize this is not all sunshine and rainbows.”
Protecting the culture—and your own well-being
When a company expands, it can be easy to lose sight of the values that define it. As “you add another club and you do it again and you do it again,” Nolan says, “it’s [harder] to protect the culture that you want to establish.” As COO, one of his primary roles is “keeping out … some of the negative components that might affect the workspace” and helping protect his highest-performing teams.Another important part of his role: being an ambassador for change—which he realizes some employees are not always comfortable embracing. “As we’re growing, we’re going to continue to evolve, [and] I have a very good appetite for change because I’m a very optimistic person,” Nolan says. “It’s almost like [what I said to my personal training] clients: ‘You want to be this person? I can get you there.’ Well, as you’re growing a business, you want to see the big business at the end.”
Nolan still works as hard as he ever has, but he says that he has learned over the years that for any entrepreneur, looking after yourself needs to be Job One. He uses the analogy of an airplane cabin depressurizing and oxygen masks coming down from the ceiling. “You wear the mask first,” he says. “Prioritize yourself in certain respects.” That means working as hard at your own mental and physical health as you do at your business, because those will help you, and by extension your team, produce better results. “Protecting culture, getting good numbers and performance—it needs to come from the top down,” Nolan says. “You need great leaders to create great leaders.”